Writing is work and cooking is relaxing.

I'm always astonished to see how badly people can behave when they think no one is noticing.

When I started to write culinary mysteries, I did it because nobody was doing it anymore.

In a mystery, the sleuth must be believably involved and emotionally invested in solving the crime.

I like cream cheese in just about anything.

After I outlined 'Catering to Nobody,' I went and worked for a caterer. And the other thing I had to do was to talk to the Jefferson County Sheriff's Department about how they investigated a crime.

I wanted to be a literary writer, so I wrote story after story and sent them to 'The New Yorker.'

One thing that improved my cooking skills was being a poor student in California... If you don't have much money, you have to learn to cook.

What one's goal should be is just to become a better writer and to tell different kinds of stories.

I told the caterer I'd work for nothing if he'd teach me about catering. I lasted one week full-time. It was exhausting.

Catering is extremely demanding financially and physically. It's a business.

The thing about working at Pixar is that everyone around you is smarter and funnier and cleverer than you and they all think the same about everyone else. Its a nice problem to have.

...One time you take a hundred thousand dollars and let a vampire go, the whole world turns on you like you're some kind of bad guy.

Wisdom is not the understanding of mystery. Wisdom is accepting that mystery is beyond understanding. That's what makes it mystery.

We of America are especially fitted to visualize and to understand the marvellous transformation of a wilderness into a land of splendid cities.

What Carew does with a football, I can do with an orange.

Never underestimate a child's ability to get into more trouble.

Dreams do come true, believe always. I dreamt every night of becoming a singer

I think if you look back through the intellectual history of human beings you can trace the way that intellectual technologies influence the way we think.

Great food needed more than chefs; it needed gourmet diners.

Publicly, we say one thing....Actually, we do another.